Principal Designer, Brand & Design System

Job Description

Company:

Hurtigruten Group is the world’s leading adventure travel group, offering unique small-ship and land-based adventures from pole to pole. We take our guests to the most spectacular areas on the planet, offering a mix of pristine wilderness and visits to genuine local communities Hurtigruten Group is revolutionising the travel industry’s approach to sustainability, allowing us to offer authentic local experiences while leaving a footprint we are proud of — both in nature and with the communities we visit.

Mission:

We are now embarking on an entirely new kind of expedition; a digital product revolution to keep us at the disruptive edge of the industry. Our mission and passion is simple: be the global leader in inspirational adventure travel and build world-class product and engineering teams.

Vision:

The vision for our products is to build the leading platform for sustainable adventure travel that creates a world-leading experience for our guests and enables Hurtigruten's ambitious growth targets.

About The Role:

The Principal Designer, Brand & Design System is responsible for making user interactions with our products second to none, empowering our customers to achieve their goals with delight. Working alongside the Design Director in close collaboration with Product Designers, Engineers, Creative and Content, you’ll establish a resonant, evolving vision of the future and a strategy to realise it. You will define the overarching creative implementation of brand into our products, via our multi-brand design system, Aurora.

As the go-to person for all things Brand Identity, you’ll lead the way towards UI and visual design excellence. By establishing and continuously improving principles that encompass interface, interaction, visual and animation design in accordance with the validated needs of our customers, you’ll empower the end-end UX Designers building the products of tomorrow with an informed strategy for us to carry out together. You will own the continued creation of the Hurtigruten Design System and work with the Design System team to grow our component library, which will include creative direction in building out a visual language that creates distinctive and memorable brand experiences across the Hurtigruten product suite.

A key part of this role is ensuring that first-class UI Design happens invariably, constantly striving for better — inspiring, mentoring and coaching UX team members and the wider business, eventually building out and leading a team of Brand & Design System Designers.

What We're Looking For:

Our ideal candidate is a seasoned designer with plenty of experience defining, developing, and delivering brand and digital products – all the while with one foot in design and the other in technology. A sharp executor, with an eye for detail and an interest in meticulously crafting digital experiences, from solid usability to motion design. A believer in the power of prototyping and iteration. A team player, interested in working in cross-functional teams, with other designers and business and technology experts. A problem solver with ideas that challenge the ordinary, together with the drive –­ and the guts – to bring them to life. Someone with a ‘here to help’ attitude, who absolutely, fundamentally believes that we’re better together.

Soft skills we’ll look for:

• UI Obsession — you were born to realise beautiful interactions in everything you do, leaving those who experience it delighted.

• Collaboration mastery — able to inclusively generate consensus on direction, approach and concepts from all levels of stakeholder.

• Excellent communication skills, verbal and written — able to form powerful narratives that align strategic business decision making and possessing the ability to make complex ideas simple and consumable for a broad range of collaborators.

• Advanced presentation skills — able to present ideas/concepts and design rationale to stakeholders with confidence to generate actionable outcomes.

• Hyper-aware and proactive — able to autonomously discover and action opportunities to drive design excellence through ambiguous or complex circumstances.

• Design Intuition — visually literate with a keen design aesthetic and fluency in the language of design and UX.

• Accountable — Able to take responsibility for your outputs, learnings/failures (we celebrate these).

• Humble — Product design is a collaborative sport #no-heroes.

• Professional — Responsible for your time, prioritisation, delegation and denials (saying no to the right things).

• Opinionated — You have strong views but are open to challenge and adaptivity.

• Always improving — You continuously seek ways to grow yourself and others around you, responding well to feedback.

• Results oriented — You know how to prove value and prioritise opportunities that demonstrate wins.

• Fluent in English – other languages are a bonus.

• Hybrid working - We offer flexible working arrangements. Given the nature of the role however, there will be periods of ideation and strategic alignment where co-location in London will be more frequent.